Second Google Suit Over Print Library Project

linumax writes "The Association of American Publishers, an organization of book publishers including Pearson Plc's Penguin unit and McGraw-Hill sued Google over its plan to create a digital Web library of printed books. The Association of American Publishers sued Wednesday after talks broke down with Google over copyright issues raised by the Google Print Library Project. Publishers say Google will infringe copyrights unless it gets advance permission for the scanning. The suit is the second by the publishing industry against Google's library plans and underscores the worries sparked by Google's expansion beyond Web search." From the article: "Google, which is working with five of the world's great libraries (Stanford, Harvard and Michigan university libraries, the New York Public Library and the Bodleian library in Oxford) to digitise their collections, stopped scanning copyrighted books in August after protests from publishers. However, it intends to resume its work next month."

Comments

Re:Won't matter for long

[MaestroSartori]

We are mere months (maybe a year) away from the ability to completely scan any book and convert it accurately to text based PDF in under an hour. It will likely be F/OSS software that does it, released ostensibly to save old books in the public domain.

When this happens, books will end up on P2P just like movies, music, porn, and images. Just as P2P helps people find interesting musicians and performers, it will help people find interesting writers and authors.

We're already practically there. Books already appear on P2P just like all of everything else. I downloaded a book just this weekend in fact, completely infringing the copyright in the process. I don't feel a shred of guilt, however, because I can't buy the book I want here yet (hardback only, paperback release date seems to vary between some time next month up to a year away). It's the 11th book in a series, I have 1-10 sitting on the shelf, but I'm not gonna buy a completely oversized hardback to continue the series.

So yeah, I'm guilty as sin. But who am I really hurting, since I have the cash in my pocket and am willing to exchange it for something that just doesn't exist yet? And which I 100% guaranteed *will* buy when it does?

High and mighty

[ifelse]

It's interesting to note that authors don't really have any say in this affair even when they're in favour of Google Print.

Re:hwah?, Pat Schroeder on point?

[Phanatic1a]

I'm surprised Pat Schroeder is involved with or leading the charge in attempts to throttle Google.

I'm not. Pat Scroeder:Book Publishers::Hillary Rosen:RIAA::Jack Valenti:MPAA.

Okay, Hillary and Jack both stepped down, but you know what I mean. All three of them are shills/whores for their respective employers/pimps.

I mean, this article goes back to 2001:

Schroeder is president of the Washington- and New York-based Association of American Publishers, sponsor of the event. Like a nurturing shepherd, she moves gently among her flock. But when she talks about threats to the group, she stiffens her back.

And who, you might be wondering, is giving Schroeder and her publishers such afright?

Librarians, of course.

No joke. Of all the dangerous and dot-complex problems that American publishers face in the near future -- economic downturns, competition for leisure time, piracy -- perhaps the most explosive one could be libraries. Publishers and librarians are squaring off for a battle royal over the way electronic books and journals are lent out from libraries and over what constitutes fair use of written material.

Grossly oversimplified: Publishers want to charge people to read material; librarians want to give it away.

"We," says Schroeder, "have a very serious issue with librarians."

Make no mistake: these folks are every bit as interested in demolishing both Fair Use and First Sale as the recording and movie industries are.

Re:No Copyrighted Books??

[Nuskrad]

Actually, many recent translations of the bible are still copyrighted (such as the New International Version).

Google's actions should be illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is a coorporation which is using copyrighted material
to provide a search service. This service allows Google to earn
revenue through ads.

I am all against antiquited copyright laws, as a consumer
I should be allowed to use what I bought in any means I want.

Google's PR department has twisted the facts. Google is
not producing content for consumers, but in fact stealing
from copyright holders.

Re:How is this different from a library?

[GreenPhreak]

What no one seems to understand here is that just because Google is scanning all of these books, the end-user can NOT see all of the text of a given book. Unlike the online information that Google indexs, where one can search and then connect to the full webpage of any search hits, the library project will only make available the search quotation and the sentence or so around it for context.

For example, if I were to look up: "JubJub Bird", it would return something like this:

-----------
Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!"
-----------

Now is this giving away the entire contents of this copyrighted work? No. It is merely giving the searcher a hint of where to look for more information. In order to give away all of the information in a copyrighted text, one would have to know exactly what to search in sentence after sentence of that text. So it really isn't giving away anything. It most assuredly isn't giving away more information that Amazon.com does when you can open up the book and look at a few sample pages.

In the same way that Google offers a searchable catalog of online web information, it will now offer a super-catalog search for library contents. I, for one, think that this will be an invaluable resource for anyone who does academic research, or a person who merely wants to know all of the references on a particular subject and relevant resources. Have some forsight, publishers of the world! This will only increase your profits when people purchase relevant texts to their interests.

                                                                              greenphreak

Mod parent up! Its NOT FLAMEBAIT

[Banner]

If you think that's flamebait, it sure goes to show you don't know what debate is all about.

To pre-emptively tackle some arguments here...

[Garwulf]

Well, I've seen this sort of thing come up time and time again, and in the hopes of contributing something that will keep the discussion informed and to the point, I'm just going to shoot a couple of things down right now, and raise a few more:

1. Google is NOT doing something new and revolutionary, they are instead extending what is already a good idea and already extant. Sample chapters have been up on the 'net for years. The ability to search for millions of books in dozens of different libraries at once by particular keywords has existed in university libraries for at least a decade, if not longer. Project Gutenberg (sp?) has been digitizing out-of-print public domain books for years as well. Google is extending this general idea, but they did not invent it. And, if they are stopped by these lawsuits, it will NOT bring the world to a halt, damage authors or the publishing industry, damage readers, create some weird heirarchy of those who have information and those who don't, or anything of the sort (in fact, we already have an overload of information in modern society).

2. The argument that what was in the first draft of the U.S. Constitution is exactly what copyright should be is extremely flawed, both historically and logically. It is flawed logically because the argument revolves around the U.S. Constitution, which has little or nothing to do with international law and the Berne Convention (and the libraries in question have books by authors from around the world). It is historically flawed because the first draft of the U.S. Constitution was an 18th century document written by 18th century people for an 18th century world, and society, including the situation of authors, has changed since then. There's a good reason why Jeffersonian democracy hasn't existed since about the 1830s. Copyright may require some tweaking to function properly in this new age of the Internet, but regressing two centuries is not the answer at all.

3. The main issue here revolves around whether Google asked for permission from the copyright holders before scanning. And, both morally and legally speaking, they should have. And, the fact is that if they had asked first, they quite possibly would have had the publishers and authors bending over backwards to help, because it IS a good idea. However, the ends do not justify the means, and quite frankly, I don't think they ever have.

Now, those issues aside, there are some good issues to raise - how do you protect copyright in this digital world? At what point is something no longer fair use when you're dealing with credited electronic excerpts? How does copyright need to change in order to balance the needs and rights of the author with the needs and rights of the reader?

Re:Celsius 232.78

[ke4roh]

ROTFL! For those who didn't get it 232.78*9/5+32=451, the kindling temperature of paper in Fahrenheit, and that leads us to a popular Ray Bradbury novel about a society that burns all the books - wheren the citizens (who care about knowledge) must preserve the knowledge by memorizing their favorite books. The title: Fahrenheit 451. If you haven't already, read it now.

Google Print is not evil (PITA to use, mebbe)

[Bimo_Dude]

I don't think that Google is going about it the wrong way. In fact, I think that the publishers are just trying to be like the *AA. I just played around with Google Print and found that Google does not, in fact, post the entire book. From their FAQ:

6. I'm already logged in. Why are you telling me the page is unavailable?

As part of our efforts to protect a book's copyright, a set of pages in every in-copyright book will be unavailable to all users.

I discovered this as I tried to read parts of a fairly recently (2004) published book. In addition, the pages of the books are images, and you have to click to read each page. Also, you cannot skip to a specific page in the book, like in a physical book. That would be a real pain in the ass for anybody who wants to read a whole book.

The publishers are freaking out about nothing. This is a tool that will increase book sales, not decrease them. More of a "teaser," if you will. This is not evil.

Google's Response

[nmec]

Surprised this wasn't in the article but you can read Google's response from Eric Schmidt here.

No Infringe. No available books.

[DrYak]

Except that Google, isn't making the digitzed books available.
Their project is different from Gutemberg.

Gutemberg projet, is about making old books freely available online. Because the *FULL* content *IS* distributed online, they restrict to texts that are :
- either too old and the copyright has expired
- for author gave explicit autorisation to publish and make freely available to everyone
- are in public domain for some other reason (obviously, a public speech hasn't a copyright).

Google on the other hand, make digitised copies of the books, for *themeself*. They do *NOT* publish the *FULL* text, but only small excerpts, to illustrate context of the search results. This is allowed the same way as you're allowed to do citation.
*NO* ebooks are made available by Google, there's no way this google project could compete with book sales. On the contrary : as pointed elsewhere in this thread, the search results include links to where the full book could be purchased.

They aren't making any money by *providing pubicly copyrighted texts* (which is piracy).
They're publishing their own datas (search result) which they obtained by their own mean (keyword search by search engine) by analysing their *private* collection of digitalised books that they keep for them self, apart from a few citation next to search result.

And these books where obtained legally, by borrowing them from a public instituion (a library) which pays corresponding license to be able to make those books available to the public (either readers, or in this case to Google). No copyright violation, google *can* access them to do their work, because the library pays for such access.

------

Compare to music :
- You can buy legally CDs.
- You can do whatever you want with your own CDs, including coasters.
- You can rip thoses CDs and build your self a digital library of FLACs/OGGs/whatever.
(I mean *you could*. Copy-protection systems make this very difficult, but in theory, it's perfectly legal).
- *ONLY* if you made the *CONTENT* available to everyone on internet without paying a license for that, that would be illegal.
- On the other hand, if some friend asks you on IRC/GoogleTalk/MSN "Do you know how many disc Prodigy has made", you can say "Hold on for a sec", quickly search your library and give an answer. *it IS legal*, as long as you don't make those disc available to everyone to download.

Same is true for google.

Speaking of twaddle....

[cpt kangarooski]

You're forgetting that if the author isn't protected from theft, he/she will be less inclined to produce the culture that's being "stolen."

Yes. But so what? The goals of society are to both encourage the creation of works and to have those works be in the public domain. While we can cause a lot of creation to occur by slightly delaying entrance into the public domain, and only granting a modicum of protection even during that initial period, there does come a point of diminishing returns. In fact, we eventually reach a point where granting more protection reduces the amount of creation.

So there will always be unprotected authors, because some works just aren't worth protecting to the extent that it would take to cause them to be created.

Furthermore, we should be responsible with copyright policy. We should provide no more incentive than the minimum amount necessary to get the maximum amount of net public benefit (i.e. the benefit of creation minus the harm caused by their not being in the public domain). To provide more of an incentive would be wasteful.

Slavery arises when a man is required to work for nothing which from the jist of your post, is exactly what you think creators should be paid.

Failure to give artists an economic incentive to create works is hardly comparable to forcing them to create. If artists aren't incentivized, they can be accountants or something. There's no one cracking a whip over them, so please stop with your useless hyperbole.

It's not the protection from theft that's evil, it's the theft itself that's evil.

It's not theft, and neither is evil. Copyright is utilitarian and essentially amoral.

Although if there were a moral component, it'd be in favor of pirates, who spread and enjoy knowledge and help ensure that works will survive, as opposed to authors, who act as gatekeepers.

Re:Won't matter for long

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

What planet are you on? 98% of what gets published still goes through journals.

Re:Google is doing EVIL....

[rlthomps-1]

So I'll ask, do you have any clue what you're talking about?

The only books displayed in full-text were those in the public domain (out of copyright). You only got exerpts of books that were copyrighted. But that's not the heart of the case. The publishers are suing google over the index they're creating, scanning the books and making a copy for themselves without clearing copyright. They're not doing evil, there's legitimate issues here, like whether or not this index a legit extention of the library's ability to lend books (i.e. doctrine of first sale).

Furthermore, I'd ask you on a higher level, how is it evil to make all the world's knowledge easily accessible to all? Sure there's some copyright issues here, but are you really ready to take the side of the book publishers that want to profit from keeping the world's knowledge scattered and inaccessable?

What are the book publishers doing to advance the possibilities in our digial world?

Re:'Clearly Illegal?' What about fair use?

[Trepalium]

Each user only gets to see a few pages if the publisher specifically authorizes this. Otherwise you only get a couple lines of text from the book. See these screenshots for information on the different book modes Google Print has. As for how a lawsuit would go if it went to court, I could see it being a very close call. Google is cutting quite close to the Fair Use exemption.

I don't see that Google really had any choice, though. If they had tried to go book-by-book and get permission for each one, it would've taken a decade to produce a useful product, and by that time certain publishers would've foolishly forged exclusive deals with other search engines. Most would've demanded fees and payments for use of their books, and other things that would've completely removed the usefulness of the service. For just doing it, Google forced the publishers to either accept the deal that was acceptable to Google (and search engines in general), or to sue them. Some have chosen the first option and even made deals with Google to provide enhanced service for their publications, and others have chosen to duke it out in court.

This will be an interesting battle to say the least. We'll see just how far "Fair Use" actually goes.